Time has a significance within therapy which may not be
apparent to you if you have not had therapy before. So, in this week’s blog we
will be exploring some aspects of time which are particularly relevant to
therapy.
Often, therapists in private practice see clients in their
own home and therefore do not have the luxury of a receptionist & waiting
room to accommodate them if they are early.
Even practice clinics or agencies may not have such facilities although
they are much more common. Thus, you
will be asked to wait until the agreed time before knocking on the door for
your session. Imagine how you would feel
if at the end of your session, which may or may not have been very emotional,
to have to walk past a stranger as you leave. I normally allow 10 minutes
between sessions which gives time for one client to leave well before the next
client is due to arrive.
If you are late, then the session still ends at the agreed
time, 50 minutes after the scheduled start time. It avoids one client having to meet the next
client as mentioned above. More
importantly, it is one of the many ways in which therapists demonstrate their
reliability in providing support for the client. By repeatedly being on time for the start and
the end of each session, over many sessions the client can feel at a gut level that
here is a pattern of support on which they may rely, even when the client
themselves may be irregular in the timings of their attendance. For clients whose formative experiences when
young were of care-givers who were unreliable in their responsiveness this can
be an important aspect of the support offered.
It is often enlightening to explore with a client what
happened and how they felt about being late. It can often be a window onto how
they manage their world and their expectations of it. This is especially true
if there is more than one non-attendance and/or lateness. Do they view therapy
as an indulgence, therefore not to be prioritised in the face of regular
traffic problems? Do they not prioritise themselves and therefore the therapy?
Are they trying to impress upon you just how busy they are? The list of
possible reasons is endless. What is important, is to try to understand what
is going on for the client when this happens. This is all part of the work of
therapy.
Sometimes, clients will be full of things to say during the
session, and only in the last few minutes engage more fully with their emotions. There may be many reasons for this. Often, it is an unconscious strategy to avoid
having to stay with difficult emotions for long. Once they recognise this
pattern they soon get frustrated as they realise they are getting in the way of
helping themselves move forward. Some
clients can feel hurt by the seeming coldness of the therapist in ending a
session whilst the client is in the middle of some intense feelings. Different
therapists work with this in different ways. Personally, I monitor the
intensity of the client’s feelings in the last few minutes of the session, offering them a choice as to whether they wish to go that deep so close to the end of
the session. Even so, at times the client may be profoundly emotional in the
last minutes, in which case I would allow the client a minute or so to compose
themselves before facing the outside world.
Clients can think of things to say just as the session is
ending. At that point, there is no possibility of exploring what the meaning is
for the client of this story. Thus, it
may be better to ask the client to bring it next time if they wish. It would be particularly important to address
this, if it were a pattern. What is the meaning of the pattern? To avoid the ending? To avoid having to stay with difficult
emotions that might be evoked by the story? All useful information about how
the client relates to their world.
Through all of these issues around time, the client can
experience the therapist’s questions around it as criticism for being early,
late or whatever. However, the work of therapy is always to try to understand
what meanings these events and patterns might have for the client and how they
experience, & relate to, the world.
It is an exploration not a judgement.
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